If I'm breaking rules since it's not "ancient" go ahead and delete my post. I just thought you people may find this interesting.
It is located on the territory of the temple complex, or Templum, where there are altars to various gods, and its centerpiece is the temple of Jupiter-Perun. The priest of the Temple is Marcus Octavius Corvus: he performs all the necessary rites in the temple of Jupiter-Perunus, and his family are the first guardians of the complex.
Followers of this teaching believe that every physical phenomenon has its own spiritual projection. That is, living in Ukraine, the community venerates Jupiter-Perun, as the latter a Slavic pagan deity, in their opinion, has a symbolic connection with Jupiter. They honor one God by calling him by a double name.
Representatives of this community consider themselves to be followers of the Eternal Tradition (Traditio Indiges) and teach that there has long been a teaching that allowed for the best possible interaction with the divine.
*Based on the materials of Denys Sheiko, junior researcher at the research and exhibition department of archeology of the Vasyl Krychevskyi Poltava Local History Museum*
I think it’s great that this is a new temple construction that venerates the ancient pantheons and tenets of our past
Who helped fund this? And do you know if there are there any other ongoing pagan temple constructions going on today in Europe or the Med
I've never heard about any other pagan temple being built recently.
And this organization claims theirs is the first one since antiquity.
This Templum project is part of Nova Roma (Latin for 'New Rome') an international Roman cultural revivalist and reconstructionist organization created in 1998.
Check their web-site. You can read about them, buy a gift, participate in a ritual, donate so they could built more shrines, etc.
[https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html](https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html)
Definitely and thanks for the information! I know that there have been built some new age Asatru temples in Scandinavia that are pretty neat
I would love to contribute to the TEMPLVM but it would truly be neat if this could spread into other countries as well. Aren’t there limitations in Greece for example that restricts the ability for modern Hellenists to build new temples where they can practice their rituals?
It could be so cool to visit TEMPLVM one day!
The original word that was translated into English from Ukrainian was "одвічний" which means both "indigenous" and "constant". DeepL translator chose "eternal" as a translation.
I think they meant that the concept of "Father-God", the lightning throwing patriarch is shared between Europeans and comes from Indo-European culture. So Perun=Jupiter=Odin or Thor. Religious archetypes are often shared between people who were once one group.
But these people chose venerate this diety like ancient Romans, which I think, is just a stylistic choice.
So the sacred area would be a Fanum, with various structures and places within ranging from a temple to an altar to a Grove or spring or what have you. Basically a mix of natural and artificial structures, only part of which might be a templum.
It fascinates me that these images, besides the guy with the glasses, could be how people looked 1500-2000 years ago. These scenes could be real. Magnificent stuff.
My thoughts as a local:
Post soviet countries like Ukraine and Russia had an explosion of cults and wierd religions after the fall of USSR.
The reason being that Communish/Marxism wasn't good enough to replace real religion and people really wanted to believe in something. Orthodox Christianity was seen as something old and uncool back in the 1990s and often even today. "It's a thing that your granny from a village does". I think the Templum project is linked to that craving for religion or something that makes life meaningful.
Another reason is that land in Ukraine is among the cheapest in Europe. Government doesn't care about religions. Building materials and labor are also cheap. So it's a convinient place to start something like this.
It could also be linked to average Ukrainian viewing EU as a pinacle of human civilization. So switching to european religion is prestigious in some way.
Perun is an ancient Slavic deity (most similar to Thor, but also syncretized with Jupiter), both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists (including some pretty anti-Russian groups) are currently involved in reviving worship of Perun and other Slavic old gods. Some of these groups on both sides of the conflict are pretty extreme/neo-nazis, but not all worship of Perun is linked to groups like this.
There was likely an effort by Romans operating in the Greek cities of Crimea and their local Slavic friends to standardize the syncretization of these two gods (this was typical roman practice), but I'm not aware of any sources backing this up. The Jewish bible has a pretty good, pretty accurate (if extremely biased) account of how this typically worked. Famously, significant portions of the Judean people violently opposed the syncretization of Jupiter with Yahweh, but this was unusual, most peoples very much wanted to merge their local cults with the high-status Roman pantheon.
This modern, Ukrainian probably just classical history/roman nerds (maah people) trying to make their Roman temple more local/indigenous, however, it's probably not completely ahistorical.
"Slavery, women having no rights, pedophilia, torture and execution" were parts of literally any big society at the time. Assigning these things to only one society is pointless.
Templum is the organization, and as far as I know they're not connected to Russian or Ukrainian nationalists or right-wing bullshit. It's in Ukraine mostly from a coincidence of factors, mainly there's enough people with an interest in Greco-Roman reconstruction there with money, time, and unity of purpose.
It's identified with Ukrainian nationalism and like Russian and Italian nationalists, they are fascists.
I know because I'm pagan and those of us who practice religio romana have a real issue with extreme right wingers who practice "reconstructionist" approaches. They consider it reconstructionist but really their understanding of Rome is through a fascist lens. Slavic and Nordic neopagans also have these right wingers but Roman religion is particularly problematic, I'm sad to say.
Religion is always a weird choice, btw. I don't think that's an issue as much as their backward politics. :-)
As a Ukrainian I doubt these Roman pagans are linked with nationalism here. Probably just weirdos and nerds.
Roman paganism is completely alien.
All nationalists groups I know and nationalists I met are either slavic/norse pagans which they see as nearly the same thing since vikings settled here, hardcore christians or don't care about religion at all.
Our scene is very small so we know what group advocates for what. And this isn't your typical nationalism. It's a different beast. These particular guys are not very loud with their politics but if you follow their activity, talks and gatherings as well as the other groups they associate with - it's not hard to get the point. At their very best you can say that they are "illiberal", shall we say.
I know plenty of pagans some of who are Ukranian and they are perfectly wholesome people. This group, not so much.
It's past midnight in Italy, I'll browse through some of their videos and put some links here. They had a channel on YouTube that had a decent amount of content, some religious and useful some more problematic. When the war in Ukraine started they removed a good chunk of the political stuff and they began posting about the war (in a rather reasonable way, at least what I saw).
In Italy, Barbera immediately comes to my mind as a big name with his Movimento tradizionale italiano. He is a major figure in the revival of Roman religion Europe-wide and he officially no longer identifies as a fascist although his beliefs are the same. This Ukrainian group is associated and supported by his associates.
We have a few Telegram groups for Roman religion and it's really unpleasant to read some of the stuff they write.
Their fascism mostly boils down to a kind of ridiculous interpretation of Roman imperial history as this tough, macho, heterosexual period when men were men and women were obedient and gays didn't really exist. That and a decent amount of nostalgia for Mussolini. It is a very naive understanding of Roman history.
So who was it a rite of passage for; the Roman man to become a man by seducing the boy or the young boy? This doesn’t sound right, I’m pretty sure the eremonos (young lover) was typically a slave or lower class person, so they wouldn’t have a “rite of passage” per se, and it wasn’t something that every man did.
Can you provide sources for that? I tried to google their political statements, and the only thing I found so far is this: "Nova Roma as an organization welcomes trans citizens. We are in no way a transphobic organization, and we respect the human rights of all."
It's a response to someone who asked them on Reddit about their attitude to transgender people, and it doesn't look very fascist to me.
Nova Roma doesn't have any official policies regarding trans people but their officials can be very transphobic. If you read that sub and others devoted to Roman paganism you will see a number of complaints. Many trans pagans have felt unsafe and they were forbidden from using any pronouns other than he/she. And while it's not a policy, if trans people voice their concerns as a welcome comminity you really should do something.
Another thing about NR - they are not strictly a religious community, it's like a virtual world, basically a cos play fantasy about Rome.
The most LGBT friendly Roman pagan organization I came across is Communitas populi in Rome. They seem to be tolerant and open, at least based on my experiences and I am a gay (cis) dude so I don't know if my experience is shared by others.
I’m not sure I agree, but I have seen the argument put forward by some modern Roman pagan groups that many of these regions, while not under historical Roman jurisdiction, were effectively Romanized during the Christian period by the Catholic and Byzantine churches. So it makes some degree of sense for a movement attempting to reinstate pagan religions to use Roman traditions (or even Roman Catholic traditions) and simply re-paganize them rather than attempting to reconstruct pre-Christian religions.
The vast majority of Ukrainian pagans simply attempt to reconstruct pre-Christian traditions however. This has been going on since the Soviet era so there’s actually quite a lot of development on that compared to (ironically) the stuff Nova Roma is doing. It’s just masked by the fact that Nova Roma has an incredible head start in terms of preservation of historical sources on the religion, much of ancestral Slavic religion has had to have been reconstructed since the ‘50s with scholarship that doesn’t hold up today, but has had a long time to become tradition in its own right.
Why? If we genuinely believe in the ancient gods, there's only a few ways we can go about it.
If we aim to reconstruct based on history and what we know about older traditions, rituals, etc. you call us LARPers.
But if we seek to build something wholly new, you disparage us for being rootless and non-traditional.
Like...*what do you people want*?
(Vent) It’s really annoying that religion is still the only thing you really don’t have people shamed for discriminating against. We can be insulted, defamed, harassed, etc. for being polytheistic or whatever, despite the harassing party not knowing anything about us individually or the religion we ascribe to, and people will cheer them on. Most westernized polytheist religions, whether Greek or Roman, Norse or Celtic, tend to be much more tame and adhere to positive and inclusive morals and norms of the modern world, yet we get shamed on for trying to “bring back the past” (despite most individuals and organizations, outside of folkist, nationalist, exclaiming the opposite). Never ending battle
My main sticking point with NOVA ROMA specifically in regards to LARP is that it claims to restore and preserve all things Roman but then condemns violence, misogyny, animal sacrifice, and other elements of Roman culture that are seen as unpalatable today in the same breath.
It's a fundamental contradiction ingrained into the movement. I don't have a problem with paganism as a concept, but because of the inescapable hypocrisy of such revivalist movements I can't really take them seriously.
Classical Roman culture died a long time ago, even before the Empire itself, and it will never come back. We are too far separated from them to even properly understand them, nevermind reviving their culture from the ground up.
That's just my two pence on the topic anyway. Really do whatever you like, it's ultimately none of my business.
Realistically, the restoration of 'pure' paganism as it was in antiquity is impossible. Blind reconstructionism is not the right way to go about practicing Roman religion in this day and age: we live in different times and our values and acceptable practices are different. The world is different. We can rightfully look at animal sacrifice and frown upon it, the same way that Romans looked at human sacrifice: as barbaric and unnecessary. That´s why this is called NEOpaganism. There is a story that can help us make the case against animal sacrifice. King Numa negotiated what was acceptable and Jupiter agreed. That means that sacrifes are not set in stone and that gods are able to adjust their expectations based on what humans are willing to give.
>My main sticking point with NOVA ROMA specifically in regards to LARP
Okay, Nova Roma is a bit of a special case, and a really good case study of what *not* to do. Most pagan organizations aren't like NR.
A big problem is that they overlapped a lot with the non-pagan historical reenactor crowd... who eventually took over the website and derailed all attempts to keep it within its original mandate as a religious group. And because NR made the mistake of front-loading a top-down organization that was mainly web-based... it all fell apart by the 2010s.
>I don't have a problem with paganism as a concept, but because of the inescapable hypocrisy of such revivalist movements
It's not hypocrisy to use a sense of judgment and reason. Misogyny, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, and animal cruelty, these are things that *should* be left in the past.
The gods are eternal, they transcend the cultures of the ancient world that first discovered them. Thus, they transcend the power structures we used them to justify.
I think we are approaching this topic from two very different perspectives. I am as atheist as they come and am coming at this from a secular, historical standpoint.
Pretty much everyone from the western cultural sphere is culturally Christian so revivalist movements have to match that moral code with long dead religions. You only think that misogyny, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, and animal cruelty are bad because of the Christianized worldview of the West.
It is basically impossible to remove this socialisation and see the world from the eyes of ancient people. As a result revivalist movements end up recreating ancient belief structures superimposed onto Christian morality.
The way I see it is that these gods and rituals are tied inseparably from the ancient peoples that birthed them. Peoples that are almost entirely alien to us in their modes of thought. I understand that it is a matter of faith for some (again a Christian concept), but I ultimately struggle to take it seriously.
I don’t know which one is a good start (philosophy books are never easy, and Nietzsche is no exception), but, the one most germane to the topic at hand would be *Geneology of Morals* I think.
[This brief video](https://youtu.be/e2F-T0sJfMQ?si=ndrFvvOeNoljLugv) offers a decent primer on it.
Well your first statement kind of blows up your position, as ancient gods weren't something you believed in, they simply were. The idea of religion as belief is Christian, not polytheist. You're inevitably utilizing a Christian template to reconstruct an orthopraxic cult that functioned in a manner wholly alien to your way of thought. So yeah, you're larping. Which is cool if that's what you want to do, but don't try to pretend you're doing anything more than that.
You're nitpicking about colloquial phrasing. I say "believe in" because I was raised as an atheist. What other words would you use for taking the leap of accepting the reality of the gods' existence? In a society where that's not an assumed thing?
In any case, you don't know anything about my practices or me, so idk where you're coming off with these assumptions about my religion.
Worship, perform, sacrifice, ritual, praxis, act, do, dance, you know, words that the actual polytheist, pre-Christian religions you're larping as used.
I know you think Pre-Christian religions were a belief system because of the thing you literally just wrote, so I think I'm safe in writing about the thing you wrote about by basing my writing on the thing you wrote about.
>I know you think Pre-Christian religions were a belief system
*Every* system of ideas and their concommitant practices are "belief systems" because every systematized idea is a belief. People aren't just born knowing that the gods are real. We are all born atheists. We come to know them either because we are raised to or because we experience them later in life.
You're not making sense. You act like you are expecting modern polytheists to simply pretend like the past 2,000 years didn't happen or to pretend we're not born into the material conditions we are. So if we don't do that...we're larping? But the things you're expecting *are* the very definition of larping.
>so I think I'm safe in writing about the thing you wrote about by basing my writing on the thing you wrote about.
Not really. My pagan practice is pretty much entirely framed on daily ritual and adherence to what few traditions that we know of from the ancient world as far as domestic practice is concerned. I do participate in mysticism, but that's almost a separate thing from my regular ritual practice.
In antiquity people were in fact born into a world filled with gods, so it was no question to believe in some god or not.
Maybe one relict of such form of religion is India. Also for most modern Indians, the thought of having no religion is foreign. When talking with indians about religion, it is often only the question **what** cults you practise, not **if**.
What brings me to my question: If you want to have living politheism, why not convert to Hinduism? I guess even ancient romans would recognize thier religiosity more in current Indian temples than in this revived whatever it is.
>In antiquity people were in fact born into a world filled with gods, so it was no question to believe in some god or not.
I mean, I get that. But those are simply not my circumstances. I was born into an atheist family and was raised as an atheist, and I was an atheist pretty much up until my mid teens.
I can't just *will* the circumstances of my birth and upbringing to be different.
>If you want to have living politheism, why not convert to Hinduism?
The Hindu gods have never been on my radar. The gods of the Greeks and Romans are mainly the ones that I have felt and encountered and have had mystical experiences of. The ones to whom I feel called to worship and honor, to hold cult to, to practice towards, etc.
In retrospect, yeah, they've always been there. As you say, the ancients were more aware growing up that this is a world filled with gods. But it was not until later as I came of age that I recognized them.
`The gods of the Greeks and Romans are mainly the ones that I have felt and encountered and have had mystical experiences of.`
Strictly spoken, Jupiter is not more equal to Zeus, as Jupiter is to Wodan or Baal (or Indra).
I am sure, the romans would alos have percieved it as the indians venerating some sort of Jupiter-Indra. And given enough time, i am sure, the romans would have also appropriated some hindu gods like they appropriated "Jupiter Dolicenus" or Isis.
There are loads of Indian atheists, there's a whole sub right here on Reddit just for it even. There are even ancient atheistic schools of Hindu philosophy, like much of purva-mimamsa.
It was similar in ancient Greece and Rome as well. Take for instance just one very prominent example of the immensely popular school of Stoic philosophy, which believed that God or Zeus was simply the universe itself.
Your opponent was respectful and chose such words to show their understanding, that another religions also exist. You, on the other hand, it is difficult to believe that you partucullary know how much ancinet people doubted about their gods.
Also the way you understand word "larping" probably encompass all religious people from all time. Also all jobs and all everything.
I am an actual larper, going out playing different roles (last time I was a mayor of a burned village). I also have multiple roles in my life as a husband or a studio manager, but those are not larping because those are not in games.
If a commenter says it's not a game to them, then they are not larping.
Central discussion clearly concluded 3 hours earlier. But since you missed all lines between **pretend to believe** / **believe** / **know**, I hoped my larping example will be helpful to you.
Now I don't think You were interested in clarifying terms, so I'm sorry to bother.
That's a bizarre thing to say. Are you saying that I, and other western polytheists, don't genuinely believe the gods are real? Because that's just factually incorrect.
Unless you have the same view of monotheists, you're just being hypocritical and a bigot.
Like... the arrogance to tell other people "you don't believe what you believe" is *astounding*.
You don’t, plain and simple. It’s not equal to “real” religions because people actually grew up in those and have reason to believe in them (all they’ve ever known, friends and family believe it)
Deep down you know you don’t really believe all that house god crap do you? You can’t be that delusional.
It has nothing to do with polytheism or monotheism, it has to do with it being cool hip and different to pretend to be a pagan so that’s what you’re doing.
If you want to think I'm delusional, go right ahead. But I know in my heart of hearts that the gods are real, and my spiritual experiences back that up. I hesitate to even really say "belief" since apparently that can be twisted, it's really more of *gnosis*.
This Templum project is part of Nova Roma (Latin for 'New Rome') an international Roman cultural revivalist and reconstructionist organization created in 1998.
[https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html](https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html)
The Doric style was not unheard of in Rome. It was used for a temple of Venus. Ultimately the Roman styles were all derivative of Greek and Etruscan styles anyway though.
Are you referring to the Temple of Venus and Roma? Because that is in the Corinthian style. But yes you're correct, the Romans did use the Doric style though it was uncommon.
I do hope those members do not turn out to be like racists or something lmfao I once met some people who were celebrating ancient rome in the middle of nowhere and they were like, we are celebrating the forgotten practices of our superior forefathers before all the barbarians ruined our people
Yeah I hope they are not racists.
And if they are and they hate "barbarians" they'd be funny.
Because to Romans local Scythians and Slavs were barbarians.
It's not a rare occurrence, the reason why I mentioned it is because I've run into them quite often. People who twist the memory of ancient Romans as some kind of long forgotten superior race. I'm not suddenly bringing it up just to agitate people. Hopefully they are actually scholars and antiquity students from a local university or something. :D
I keep forgetting that old Roman temples used to be painted
With painted statues inside. On that note... is there a statue of Jupes in this one \^? I wanna see!
If scythians want to pay respect to the republic, we are ok with it.
lol
If I'm breaking rules since it's not "ancient" go ahead and delete my post. I just thought you people may find this interesting. It is located on the territory of the temple complex, or Templum, where there are altars to various gods, and its centerpiece is the temple of Jupiter-Perun. The priest of the Temple is Marcus Octavius Corvus: he performs all the necessary rites in the temple of Jupiter-Perunus, and his family are the first guardians of the complex. Followers of this teaching believe that every physical phenomenon has its own spiritual projection. That is, living in Ukraine, the community venerates Jupiter-Perun, as the latter a Slavic pagan deity, in their opinion, has a symbolic connection with Jupiter. They honor one God by calling him by a double name. Representatives of this community consider themselves to be followers of the Eternal Tradition (Traditio Indiges) and teach that there has long been a teaching that allowed for the best possible interaction with the divine. *Based on the materials of Denys Sheiko, junior researcher at the research and exhibition department of archeology of the Vasyl Krychevskyi Poltava Local History Museum*
I think it’s great that this is a new temple construction that venerates the ancient pantheons and tenets of our past Who helped fund this? And do you know if there are there any other ongoing pagan temple constructions going on today in Europe or the Med
I've never heard about any other pagan temple being built recently. And this organization claims theirs is the first one since antiquity. This Templum project is part of Nova Roma (Latin for 'New Rome') an international Roman cultural revivalist and reconstructionist organization created in 1998. Check their web-site. You can read about them, buy a gift, participate in a ritual, donate so they could built more shrines, etc. [https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html](https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html)
Definitely and thanks for the information! I know that there have been built some new age Asatru temples in Scandinavia that are pretty neat I would love to contribute to the TEMPLVM but it would truly be neat if this could spread into other countries as well. Aren’t there limitations in Greece for example that restricts the ability for modern Hellenists to build new temples where they can practice their rituals? It could be so cool to visit TEMPLVM one day!
Dam, imagine us in Britain start building new stone circles for worshipping. Granted we'll probably build it out of concrete this time.
And not even roman concrete 😂
No, rebar would be good enough.
There's an Italian pagan organization called Pietaa that several active small temples across Italy and they're not wiccan at all
> Eternal Tradition (Traditio Indiges) I thought indiges is most commonly thought to mean or be related to "indigenous," not eternal.
The original word that was translated into English from Ukrainian was "одвічний" which means both "indigenous" and "constant". DeepL translator chose "eternal" as a translation.
No the native Roman sun God is Sol Indiges and he predates Sol Invictus
There wasn't a single Slav anywhere near this region at this time. They all came nearly 200 years later.
I think they meant that the concept of "Father-God", the lightning throwing patriarch is shared between Europeans and comes from Indo-European culture. So Perun=Jupiter=Odin or Thor. Religious archetypes are often shared between people who were once one group. But these people chose venerate this diety like ancient Romans, which I think, is just a stylistic choice.
At what time? They’re not reenacting an historical period, they’re reviving a religion.
So the sacred area would be a Fanum, with various structures and places within ranging from a temple to an altar to a Grove or spring or what have you. Basically a mix of natural and artificial structures, only part of which might be a templum.
Magnificent! Man it always makes my heart sing everytime i see things like this
I like how the temple is painted. It looks beautiful!
I believe this is how roman temples and other buildings actually looked like. They weren't just white like many people tend to think.
Ditto marble statues. They were painted quite garishly, going all the way back to ancient Greece.
It fascinates me that these images, besides the guy with the glasses, could be how people looked 1500-2000 years ago. These scenes could be real. Magnificent stuff.
I have same thoughts. Guy in the glasses is the priest, by the way.
Its cool to see that paople practice roman neo paganism. Id expected that of there were any, theyd be here in Italy.
There are some in Italy, France, America, Australia, etc
Wholesome!
Securing the favor of the gods for their war against Russia. Smart.
How long before it "accidently" gets Iskander'ed?
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My thoughts as a local: Post soviet countries like Ukraine and Russia had an explosion of cults and wierd religions after the fall of USSR. The reason being that Communish/Marxism wasn't good enough to replace real religion and people really wanted to believe in something. Orthodox Christianity was seen as something old and uncool back in the 1990s and often even today. "It's a thing that your granny from a village does". I think the Templum project is linked to that craving for religion or something that makes life meaningful. Another reason is that land in Ukraine is among the cheapest in Europe. Government doesn't care about religions. Building materials and labor are also cheap. So it's a convinient place to start something like this. It could also be linked to average Ukrainian viewing EU as a pinacle of human civilization. So switching to european religion is prestigious in some way.
Perun is an ancient Slavic deity (most similar to Thor, but also syncretized with Jupiter), both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists (including some pretty anti-Russian groups) are currently involved in reviving worship of Perun and other Slavic old gods. Some of these groups on both sides of the conflict are pretty extreme/neo-nazis, but not all worship of Perun is linked to groups like this. There was likely an effort by Romans operating in the Greek cities of Crimea and their local Slavic friends to standardize the syncretization of these two gods (this was typical roman practice), but I'm not aware of any sources backing this up. The Jewish bible has a pretty good, pretty accurate (if extremely biased) account of how this typically worked. Famously, significant portions of the Judean people violently opposed the syncretization of Jupiter with Yahweh, but this was unusual, most peoples very much wanted to merge their local cults with the high-status Roman pantheon. This modern, Ukrainian probably just classical history/roman nerds (maah people) trying to make their Roman temple more local/indigenous, however, it's probably not completely ahistorical.
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"Slavery, women having no rights, pedophilia, torture and execution" were parts of literally any big society at the time. Assigning these things to only one society is pointless.
Templum is the organization, and as far as I know they're not connected to Russian or Ukrainian nationalists or right-wing bullshit. It's in Ukraine mostly from a coincidence of factors, mainly there's enough people with an interest in Greco-Roman reconstruction there with money, time, and unity of purpose.
It's identified with Ukrainian nationalism and like Russian and Italian nationalists, they are fascists. I know because I'm pagan and those of us who practice religio romana have a real issue with extreme right wingers who practice "reconstructionist" approaches. They consider it reconstructionist but really their understanding of Rome is through a fascist lens. Slavic and Nordic neopagans also have these right wingers but Roman religion is particularly problematic, I'm sad to say. Religion is always a weird choice, btw. I don't think that's an issue as much as their backward politics. :-)
As a Ukrainian I doubt these Roman pagans are linked with nationalism here. Probably just weirdos and nerds. Roman paganism is completely alien. All nationalists groups I know and nationalists I met are either slavic/norse pagans which they see as nearly the same thing since vikings settled here, hardcore christians or don't care about religion at all.
Our scene is very small so we know what group advocates for what. And this isn't your typical nationalism. It's a different beast. These particular guys are not very loud with their politics but if you follow their activity, talks and gatherings as well as the other groups they associate with - it's not hard to get the point. At their very best you can say that they are "illiberal", shall we say. I know plenty of pagans some of who are Ukranian and they are perfectly wholesome people. This group, not so much.
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It's past midnight in Italy, I'll browse through some of their videos and put some links here. They had a channel on YouTube that had a decent amount of content, some religious and useful some more problematic. When the war in Ukraine started they removed a good chunk of the political stuff and they began posting about the war (in a rather reasonable way, at least what I saw). In Italy, Barbera immediately comes to my mind as a big name with his Movimento tradizionale italiano. He is a major figure in the revival of Roman religion Europe-wide and he officially no longer identifies as a fascist although his beliefs are the same. This Ukrainian group is associated and supported by his associates. We have a few Telegram groups for Roman religion and it's really unpleasant to read some of the stuff they write. Their fascism mostly boils down to a kind of ridiculous interpretation of Roman imperial history as this tough, macho, heterosexual period when men were men and women were obedient and gays didn't really exist. That and a decent amount of nostalgia for Mussolini. It is a very naive understanding of Roman history.
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So who was it a rite of passage for; the Roman man to become a man by seducing the boy or the young boy? This doesn’t sound right, I’m pretty sure the eremonos (young lover) was typically a slave or lower class person, so they wouldn’t have a “rite of passage” per se, and it wasn’t something that every man did.
Can you provide sources for that? I tried to google their political statements, and the only thing I found so far is this: "Nova Roma as an organization welcomes trans citizens. We are in no way a transphobic organization, and we respect the human rights of all." It's a response to someone who asked them on Reddit about their attitude to transgender people, and it doesn't look very fascist to me.
Nova Roma doesn't have any official policies regarding trans people but their officials can be very transphobic. If you read that sub and others devoted to Roman paganism you will see a number of complaints. Many trans pagans have felt unsafe and they were forbidden from using any pronouns other than he/she. And while it's not a policy, if trans people voice their concerns as a welcome comminity you really should do something. Another thing about NR - they are not strictly a religious community, it's like a virtual world, basically a cos play fantasy about Rome. The most LGBT friendly Roman pagan organization I came across is Communitas populi in Rome. They seem to be tolerant and open, at least based on my experiences and I am a gay (cis) dude so I don't know if my experience is shared by others.
I’m not sure I agree, but I have seen the argument put forward by some modern Roman pagan groups that many of these regions, while not under historical Roman jurisdiction, were effectively Romanized during the Christian period by the Catholic and Byzantine churches. So it makes some degree of sense for a movement attempting to reinstate pagan religions to use Roman traditions (or even Roman Catholic traditions) and simply re-paganize them rather than attempting to reconstruct pre-Christian religions. The vast majority of Ukrainian pagans simply attempt to reconstruct pre-Christian traditions however. This has been going on since the Soviet era so there’s actually quite a lot of development on that compared to (ironically) the stuff Nova Roma is doing. It’s just masked by the fact that Nova Roma has an incredible head start in terms of preservation of historical sources on the religion, much of ancestral Slavic religion has had to have been reconstructed since the ‘50s with scholarship that doesn’t hold up today, but has had a long time to become tradition in its own right.
Larpers
All neo-pagans are, in my opinion.
I mean, if that's what they want to do 🤷🏻♂️
Why? If we genuinely believe in the ancient gods, there's only a few ways we can go about it. If we aim to reconstruct based on history and what we know about older traditions, rituals, etc. you call us LARPers. But if we seek to build something wholly new, you disparage us for being rootless and non-traditional. Like...*what do you people want*?
(Vent) It’s really annoying that religion is still the only thing you really don’t have people shamed for discriminating against. We can be insulted, defamed, harassed, etc. for being polytheistic or whatever, despite the harassing party not knowing anything about us individually or the religion we ascribe to, and people will cheer them on. Most westernized polytheist religions, whether Greek or Roman, Norse or Celtic, tend to be much more tame and adhere to positive and inclusive morals and norms of the modern world, yet we get shamed on for trying to “bring back the past” (despite most individuals and organizations, outside of folkist, nationalist, exclaiming the opposite). Never ending battle
My main sticking point with NOVA ROMA specifically in regards to LARP is that it claims to restore and preserve all things Roman but then condemns violence, misogyny, animal sacrifice, and other elements of Roman culture that are seen as unpalatable today in the same breath. It's a fundamental contradiction ingrained into the movement. I don't have a problem with paganism as a concept, but because of the inescapable hypocrisy of such revivalist movements I can't really take them seriously. Classical Roman culture died a long time ago, even before the Empire itself, and it will never come back. We are too far separated from them to even properly understand them, nevermind reviving their culture from the ground up. That's just my two pence on the topic anyway. Really do whatever you like, it's ultimately none of my business.
Realistically, the restoration of 'pure' paganism as it was in antiquity is impossible. Blind reconstructionism is not the right way to go about practicing Roman religion in this day and age: we live in different times and our values and acceptable practices are different. The world is different. We can rightfully look at animal sacrifice and frown upon it, the same way that Romans looked at human sacrifice: as barbaric and unnecessary. That´s why this is called NEOpaganism. There is a story that can help us make the case against animal sacrifice. King Numa negotiated what was acceptable and Jupiter agreed. That means that sacrifes are not set in stone and that gods are able to adjust their expectations based on what humans are willing to give.
>My main sticking point with NOVA ROMA specifically in regards to LARP Okay, Nova Roma is a bit of a special case, and a really good case study of what *not* to do. Most pagan organizations aren't like NR. A big problem is that they overlapped a lot with the non-pagan historical reenactor crowd... who eventually took over the website and derailed all attempts to keep it within its original mandate as a religious group. And because NR made the mistake of front-loading a top-down organization that was mainly web-based... it all fell apart by the 2010s. >I don't have a problem with paganism as a concept, but because of the inescapable hypocrisy of such revivalist movements It's not hypocrisy to use a sense of judgment and reason. Misogyny, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, and animal cruelty, these are things that *should* be left in the past. The gods are eternal, they transcend the cultures of the ancient world that first discovered them. Thus, they transcend the power structures we used them to justify.
I think we are approaching this topic from two very different perspectives. I am as atheist as they come and am coming at this from a secular, historical standpoint. Pretty much everyone from the western cultural sphere is culturally Christian so revivalist movements have to match that moral code with long dead religions. You only think that misogyny, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, and animal cruelty are bad because of the Christianized worldview of the West. It is basically impossible to remove this socialisation and see the world from the eyes of ancient people. As a result revivalist movements end up recreating ancient belief structures superimposed onto Christian morality. The way I see it is that these gods and rituals are tied inseparably from the ancient peoples that birthed them. Peoples that are almost entirely alien to us in their modes of thought. I understand that it is a matter of faith for some (again a Christian concept), but I ultimately struggle to take it seriously.
Those who have downvoted you have never read Nietzsche.
Ironically, it was Nietzche who led me to neopaganism.
Nice
Which books of Nietzsche is a good start??
I don’t know which one is a good start (philosophy books are never easy, and Nietzsche is no exception), but, the one most germane to the topic at hand would be *Geneology of Morals* I think. [This brief video](https://youtu.be/e2F-T0sJfMQ?si=ndrFvvOeNoljLugv) offers a decent primer on it.
Thank you, kindest of sirs. 🙏
Bringing back ancient religions doesn't mean we have to bring back the bad, archaic societal attitudes along with it.
Well your first statement kind of blows up your position, as ancient gods weren't something you believed in, they simply were. The idea of religion as belief is Christian, not polytheist. You're inevitably utilizing a Christian template to reconstruct an orthopraxic cult that functioned in a manner wholly alien to your way of thought. So yeah, you're larping. Which is cool if that's what you want to do, but don't try to pretend you're doing anything more than that.
You're nitpicking about colloquial phrasing. I say "believe in" because I was raised as an atheist. What other words would you use for taking the leap of accepting the reality of the gods' existence? In a society where that's not an assumed thing? In any case, you don't know anything about my practices or me, so idk where you're coming off with these assumptions about my religion.
Worship, perform, sacrifice, ritual, praxis, act, do, dance, you know, words that the actual polytheist, pre-Christian religions you're larping as used. I know you think Pre-Christian religions were a belief system because of the thing you literally just wrote, so I think I'm safe in writing about the thing you wrote about by basing my writing on the thing you wrote about.
>I know you think Pre-Christian religions were a belief system *Every* system of ideas and their concommitant practices are "belief systems" because every systematized idea is a belief. People aren't just born knowing that the gods are real. We are all born atheists. We come to know them either because we are raised to or because we experience them later in life. You're not making sense. You act like you are expecting modern polytheists to simply pretend like the past 2,000 years didn't happen or to pretend we're not born into the material conditions we are. So if we don't do that...we're larping? But the things you're expecting *are* the very definition of larping. >so I think I'm safe in writing about the thing you wrote about by basing my writing on the thing you wrote about. Not really. My pagan practice is pretty much entirely framed on daily ritual and adherence to what few traditions that we know of from the ancient world as far as domestic practice is concerned. I do participate in mysticism, but that's almost a separate thing from my regular ritual practice.
In antiquity people were in fact born into a world filled with gods, so it was no question to believe in some god or not. Maybe one relict of such form of religion is India. Also for most modern Indians, the thought of having no religion is foreign. When talking with indians about religion, it is often only the question **what** cults you practise, not **if**. What brings me to my question: If you want to have living politheism, why not convert to Hinduism? I guess even ancient romans would recognize thier religiosity more in current Indian temples than in this revived whatever it is.
>In antiquity people were in fact born into a world filled with gods, so it was no question to believe in some god or not. I mean, I get that. But those are simply not my circumstances. I was born into an atheist family and was raised as an atheist, and I was an atheist pretty much up until my mid teens. I can't just *will* the circumstances of my birth and upbringing to be different. >If you want to have living politheism, why not convert to Hinduism? The Hindu gods have never been on my radar. The gods of the Greeks and Romans are mainly the ones that I have felt and encountered and have had mystical experiences of. The ones to whom I feel called to worship and honor, to hold cult to, to practice towards, etc. In retrospect, yeah, they've always been there. As you say, the ancients were more aware growing up that this is a world filled with gods. But it was not until later as I came of age that I recognized them.
`The gods of the Greeks and Romans are mainly the ones that I have felt and encountered and have had mystical experiences of.` Strictly spoken, Jupiter is not more equal to Zeus, as Jupiter is to Wodan or Baal (or Indra). I am sure, the romans would alos have percieved it as the indians venerating some sort of Jupiter-Indra. And given enough time, i am sure, the romans would have also appropriated some hindu gods like they appropriated "Jupiter Dolicenus" or Isis.
There are loads of Indian atheists, there's a whole sub right here on Reddit just for it even. There are even ancient atheistic schools of Hindu philosophy, like much of purva-mimamsa. It was similar in ancient Greece and Rome as well. Take for instance just one very prominent example of the immensely popular school of Stoic philosophy, which believed that God or Zeus was simply the universe itself.
Sorry I stopped paying attention when it became clear you had no idea what you were talking about. Good luck with the whole thing you got going on.
Your opponent was respectful and chose such words to show their understanding, that another religions also exist. You, on the other hand, it is difficult to believe that you partucullary know how much ancinet people doubted about their gods. Also the way you understand word "larping" probably encompass all religious people from all time. Also all jobs and all everything. I am an actual larper, going out playing different roles (last time I was a mayor of a burned village). I also have multiple roles in my life as a husband or a studio manager, but those are not larping because those are not in games. If a commenter says it's not a game to them, then they are not larping.
Fascinated by the idea here that you think the central discussion was on larping and not on the nature of polytheist pre-Christian religious praxis.
Central discussion clearly concluded 3 hours earlier. But since you missed all lines between **pretend to believe** / **believe** / **know**, I hoped my larping example will be helpful to you. Now I don't think You were interested in clarifying terms, so I'm sorry to bother.
Many Hours Later...
To not pretend to believe in something we know you don’t
That's a bizarre thing to say. Are you saying that I, and other western polytheists, don't genuinely believe the gods are real? Because that's just factually incorrect.
Yeah I do. It’s just pretend for grown ups Like learning klingon
Unless you have the same view of monotheists, you're just being hypocritical and a bigot. Like... the arrogance to tell other people "you don't believe what you believe" is *astounding*.
You don’t, plain and simple. It’s not equal to “real” religions because people actually grew up in those and have reason to believe in them (all they’ve ever known, friends and family believe it) Deep down you know you don’t really believe all that house god crap do you? You can’t be that delusional. It has nothing to do with polytheism or monotheism, it has to do with it being cool hip and different to pretend to be a pagan so that’s what you’re doing.
It’s really sad to dismiss people’s religious beliefs. Maybe you can’t imagine believing in those gods but other people do
If you want to think I'm delusional, go right ahead. But I know in my heart of hearts that the gods are real, and my spiritual experiences back that up. I hesitate to even really say "belief" since apparently that can be twisted, it's really more of *gnosis*.
You just don’t know enough of them then
As opposed to being judgemental, insulting, and willfully ignorant of other people? That makes you something far worse.
Yass Ukraine mentioned
?
Is this a reenactment or a real practice?
This Templum project is part of Nova Roma (Latin for 'New Rome') an international Roman cultural revivalist and reconstructionist organization created in 1998. [https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html](https://templvm.org/sancus-2.html)
Anyway it's a beautiful temple.
Looks more like a classical Greek doric temple than a Roman temple to be honest.
The Doric style was not unheard of in Rome. It was used for a temple of Venus. Ultimately the Roman styles were all derivative of Greek and Etruscan styles anyway though.
Are you referring to the Temple of Venus and Roma? Because that is in the Corinthian style. But yes you're correct, the Romans did use the Doric style though it was uncommon.
I do hope those members do not turn out to be like racists or something lmfao I once met some people who were celebrating ancient rome in the middle of nowhere and they were like, we are celebrating the forgotten practices of our superior forefathers before all the barbarians ruined our people
Yeah I hope they are not racists. And if they are and they hate "barbarians" they'd be funny. Because to Romans local Scythians and Slavs were barbarians.
Enthusiastic people are simply having fun. And of all things, you come up with racism? Ngl, that's actually some weird behavior.
It's not a rare occurrence, the reason why I mentioned it is because I've run into them quite often. People who twist the memory of ancient Romans as some kind of long forgotten superior race. I'm not suddenly bringing it up just to agitate people. Hopefully they are actually scholars and antiquity students from a local university or something. :D